See his announcement: Genome in the Wild. If you don’t know, Zack is the driving force behind the Harappa Ancestry Project. Seeing how the Indian scientific-bureaucratic complex still seems to be retarding rapid progress in human genomics (how many people have heard of the Indian Genome Variation Consortium? Their blog, which is hosted on blogspot, was last updated 1 year ago!), I think it can be argued that Zack has done more for the understanding of the population relationships of the Indian populations in the last 6 months than the Indian government has in 60 years! I’m hoping I’ll be proven wrong with a list of awesome and result rich publications in the comments.

#1, the southeast asian paper i rereviewed used HUGO. and yep, not too many SNPs the indian project has a browser too…..

Justin Loe

Yep, I caught that after I posted.

Nick Patterson

The paper David Reich and I wrote in collaboration with our Indian colleagues at
CCMB, Hyderabad
“Reconstructing Indian Population History” was extensively reviewed by you (!) , and
made at least some contribution to “understanding population relationships of the
Indian populations”. CCMB is of course an Indian government institute.

The Harappa blog (and this blog) is doing some great work and should not need to be measured against others, but for example the above noted paper by Reich et al. (2009), the references therein, and the two recent publications in AJHG (also reviewed here) should make it clear that researchers associated with Indian government institutes have contributed plenty to the understanding of population relationships in India. Blogosphere presence is not necessarily what is most important.

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About Razib Khan

I have degrees in biology and biochemistry, a passion for genetics, history, and philosophy, and shrimp is my favorite food. In relation to nationality I'm a American Northwesterner, in politics I'm a reactionary, and as for religion I have none (I'm an atheist). If you want to know more, see the links at http://www.razib.com